OSCon

I’ll be at O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention this Thursday and Friday. Drop me a note if you’ll be there too and want to chat. I’m on a panel Friday morning, even though my name’s not listed yet.

interview questions

I always hate it when, in an interview, I’m asked to solve a logic puzzle. Now Google is using math puzzles to recruit. These sorts of things seem good at identifying folks who might be good students, folks who are good at competing against others to solve toy problems. But a good developer has quite different skills. A good developer works with others to solve real problems. A knack for triage, good manners, writing skills and lots of other things are as important as logic skills.

When I interview I like to ask people to describe a problem they encountered and tell how they solved it–to tell a story. Or I describe to them a real problem I’m currently working on, and see how they might approach it. Not that I’m actually convinced this works much better. Hiring people I haven’t previously worked with still always feels like a lottery…

Part-time operations person needed in San Francisco

Nutch has funds from Yahoo Research Labs! to pay someone 1/3-time to run a crawler hosted at the Internet Archive in San Francisco. We have some machines and plenty of bandwidth there, we just need a pair of hands to keep things running. The goal is not to create a search site, but rather just to maintain a largish crawl (several hundred millon pages) for use by academic researchers and Nutch developers. Do you know anyone qualified who might be interested in this job? If so, please send a note to jobs @ lucene.com.

Rohit’s Wedding

As Tim Bray reports, Rohit’s wedding was quite a show.

Tim mostly declines to name drop, but I’m not so modest. I had fun talking to Larry Masinter (whom I was a summer intern for way back in 1985), Adam Rifkin (now at Commerce.Net with Rohit), Gordon Mohr (the guy behind Heritrix) and others.